Fast Company | Business + Innovation: Imagine you’re interviewing candidates for a high-pressure, fast-paced job in your company. It’ll require supreme composure in stressful situations, outside-the-box thinking, and above all, that they bring their most polished professionalism to the office every day.
Across from the interviewing table, you look them in the eyes and ask, "Who would win in a fight between Spider-Man and Batman?"
6 comments:
I think the "Batman or Spiderman" questions can be really valuable when hiring an employee. Not only are you looking for quick-thinking skills, you're also looking for personality and how this new hire will fit in with the dynamics of the company. However, these questions need to walk a fine line, and they should not be the deciding factor between applicants. They should not be in any way, shape, or form insulting. For instance, I was thrown a curveball question at my entrance interview for a very well known theater program. The interviewer asked me, "What would you do if I told you to f*ck off?" It caught me by extreme surprise and after the interview was over, I found myself feeling attacked by the nature of the question. After all, this is a job interview. Light-hearted curveball questions are fine, but go beyond that and you risk the emotional safety of your applicant.
These interview questions can be hard to handle for many reasons and it doesn’t help that I’m already nervous about eh job. I was asked, “Apples or oranges?” in an interview once and I was struck at how to respond. I said oranges and the interviewer moved right along as if nothing had been out of the ordinary. She didn’t even ask why! The fact that there was no follow up to that out of the blue question threw me off as much as the question had and I struggled through the rest of the interview. It may say a lot the employer the ability your employee has to handle unexpected situations, but to what extent? The only way the employer would truly know for sure would be by hiring that person and putting them through the paces. “Batman or Spiderman?” doesn’t provided true results, or at least not ones that relate to relevant work situations.
I personally despise these curveball questions as an interviewee, just because I feel very pressured to come up with a clever response. Interviews are stressful enough, there's no need to push people past the normal threshold. I think there is some merit in the intention behind these questions, to see how an interviewee might respond quickly on their feet and how they handle the pressure, but I think there's a huge difference between the pressure felt in an interview and the pressure felt on the job. If you really want to see me work on my feet, have me shadow a tech rehearsal or something. I don't think it's fair to base a job position on how well I answer a question like, "Who is your favorite Disney princess?" Ask me the questions that matter, please.
I absolutely thrive off of questions like these. Today, so many candidates are equally qualified technically, and resumes tend to blur together. Thus, it makes perfect sense to explore a candidate's personality through off-beat questions. While having a interviewee describe their three most advantageous qualities works toward differentiating candidates apart personally, the fastest, most direct way to understand a candidate is to have a real (or as close to real as interviews allow) interaction with them. These questions catalyze those specific kinds of real person-to-person discussions. As I was interviewing for colleges, I found I came away from irregular interviews feeling much more confident in their understanding of me as an applicant than in more traditional interview settings. Furthermore, while interviews are still primarily for employers to get to know potential employees, the interview should also serve the interviewee, allowing them to better know the environment they could potentially be committing to. To that end, the questions asked provide a wealth of knowledge to the candidate.
Here are some great tips to prepare for curveball interview questions.
I was preparing for an interview and looking for questions asked by an interviewer. There I find some curveball questions which really helps me a lot.
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